Fungii.com

March 25, 2003

I'm Still Alive

Sorry I haven't been blogging lately, been sucked into watching the war thing on TV and on the web. Need.. to get... away... Been using GoogleNews quite a bit [its great] and of course, CNN. On TV, I've been switching between CNN, BBCnews and CBC Newsworld. Its interesting to see the differences in the way they report things. CNN is very much pro-war and has a positive spin [usually] on most developments ['cept casualties and POW's] while the BBC seems very much anti-war and goes to great pains to report everything negatively. Quite the contrast. Depending on which channel you're watching, you would think the war is either going great with victory just around the corner or terribly, the sky is falling, another Vietnam. So much for objectivity. Newsworld is on the anti-war side, but not as blatently rabid about it as the BBC. CBC radio, at least in Calgary, is most definately bent-out-of-shape against the war, so much so I have to turn it off in the morning. It's really, really bad, I think even people who are against the war would cringe.

The coalition is bending over backwards to minimize civilian casualties. This is making it harder for them to carry out their missions, but they hope in the long run it will pay dividends by winning over the civilian population. But will it? Will the Iraqi population appreciate the effort they've made? I have my doubts, but it is quite an amazing accomplishment, at least so far. They could make things so much easier for themselves by just carpet bombing the whole country, but they haven't. Here's an article on this angle.

Contrast this war, if you will, with even those America has fought before — the civilian toll in Vietnam or, at its apogee of horror, the firebombing of Tokyo, Dresden or Hamburg during World War II and the finale of atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once, we made almost no distinction between military and civilian targets. Now — at the apparent cost of American lives — we do.

They've dropped more than 26 million leaflets on Iraq's 25 million people. We give up, no more leaflets!

And speaking of psychological warfare, here's a thing on psyops via CBC. [warning: uses Flash] They show some of the leaflets being dropped on Iraq. Take an offensive posture and you will be destroyed.

We will liberate you back to the stone age, you bastards!

In an incident after the US Air Force had carpet-bombed a south Vietnamese town to clear out Viet Cong guerrillas, an American officer famously commented: "We had to destroy the town to save it".